The good, the bad, and the WTF?!?
The news coming out of fanfaire is pretty much old news at this point, but oh well.
For those who weren’t listening in on the live chat (and/or were living under a rock for the last 3 days), the new expansion is Odus… complete with Tox Forest, Erudin, Paineel and The Hole.
Adventure levels, tradeskill levels, and guild levels are all increasing by 10. The number of AA’s we can get are going up by… I think it was 50, but there won’t be a new AA line. Curious.
I’ve been arguing it for a while with friends who disagreed with me, but it seems that the new expansion will somewhat trivialize mythicals. It is only natural. You can’t have a piece of gear that out-strips everything else for too long and mythicals are 2 expansions old now. Sooner or later, everything has to be replaced or what is the point? Epics in EQ1 were top dog (for the most part) for 2 expansions as well before they started being phased out.
Still, there will be new weapons that share traits with mythicals and I believe there was some mention that having the mythical would be a requirement for obtaining some of them, but I could be remembering that wrong.
Raiding.
/sigh.
Raiding is going to continue along the lines of VS raids with an increase in annoyance factor. Raids will be even MORE reliant upon potions, but curing one effect can often result in a second landing while some effects are effects that have a “cure this and you die” type stigma attached.
Apparently the raid developers listened to all the players saying this method of raiding was anything BUT fun and translated that to, “Give us more please.” I equate it to a group of proctologists sitting around pondering their profession before one pipes up with, “I’ve got it! We all know that everyone hates rectal exams. What if we quit using a lubricant and the latex gloves and use gloves made out of sandpaper instead? Do you think people would start enjoying it then?” And all the other proctologists agree to it.
Utility classes are going to be getting an overhaul of sorts. The limited 24-person raid has always been, in my mind, insanely restrictive… especially considering how many classes there are in the game. Throw in the concept many people have that each group needs a dirge or a troub, groups need specific healers, and groups need either a coercer or an illusionist and some classes will be left out.
The idea they tossed out was that the utility classes will have their abilities overhauled to be raid wide. Dirge buffs would hit everyone rather than just their group… and so on with the other utility classes. As a result, a raid will only need 1 dirge opening another spot on the raid for some other class.
Personally, I think this is a good move for a number of reasons… not the least of which is that if future raids actually are going to be as idiotic and asinine as their description of them has led me to believe, this dirge won’t be raiding anymore at all. I have better things to do with my time.
Like smashing my head in a vice.
Or pouding my toes with a sledgehammer.
Or slathering my body in honey and laying down in a bed of fire ants.
Or using an africanized beehive as a pinata.
Or going down a waterslide covered in broken glass and diving into a pool filled with lemon juice.
Or…
Well, you get the picture.
That doesn’t match up with how I heard them — they said they don’t want to create a cure-all potion, but that they never intended the curing to be as out-of-control as it is now. Instead, they want the smaller and trash encounters to incorporate crowd control more. In regards to curing, they don’t want the current mentality of just watching the bars for dots and hitting cures, but instead want some thought around whether it is even worth curing. They seemed to want curing to be a tactical decision in boss ifghts.
That could be. I wasn’t there and I didn’t listen to all of the chat. I’m just going off of some of the writeups that were posted by guildies who were actually there. One person compared it to a cross between playing “Whack a Mole” and “Russian Roulette.”
The truth, of course, will only be revealed once the expansion actually goes live.
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